The rapid development of technology in combination with the exponential growth of data traffic creates requirements for increased optical networking service velocity and decreased time-to-revenue. This has a profound impact on the way in which telecommunications carriers need to build out their networks—service deployment within an optical network needs to happen at an increasingly faster pace while at the same time decreasing associated costs. This also applies in the event of a service degradation or disruption in which diagnostics of the service must be performed.
Deployment of a conventional optical transport network involves installation, testing, and turn-up of optical paths. Traditionally, this would require a “truck-roll” of highly skilled technicians along with expensive test equipment to each site in the network that is involved in carrying the optical circuit(s). In addition, provisioning circuits across multiple SONET rings in the traditional SONET network architecture is currently time consuming and again, involves the physical presence of a technician and test equipment at each intermediate point in the circuit. The same holds true when the need arises to perform diagnostics on a circuit that has degraded or been disrupted. Currently, the shortage of qualified technicians coupled with the need for expensive test equipment and time consuming truck-rolls creates serious concerns regarding the feasibility, scalability, and time-to-market of building out large scale optical networks.
However, the latest developments in intelligent optical networks promise the cost benefit of mesh restoration and the ease of point and click bandwidth provisioning. These developments will go a long way towards alleviating the time consuming task of provisioning circuits across multiple SONET rings. They do not however address the more fundamental issues of deploying and maintaining the network.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an integrated network diagnostic tool set that is used in the installation and maintenance of optical transport networks. The diagnostic tool set is characterized by the use of on-board optical and electronic test equipment that is directly integrated into each network element residing in the optical network. Additionally, the tool set includes a software-implemented interface that enables technicians to trigger diagnostic tests at the network elements and then display, analyze and manipulate the test results at a remote network operation site.